


dim the lights, sing the songs

by malicegeres



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Bad Small Local Theater, Book Omens Week, Book Omens Week 2020, Date Night, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Slice of Life, We Got It All, feeding ducks, nice restaurants
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:33:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22423384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/malicegeres/pseuds/malicegeres
Summary: An ordinary day in the life of Crowley and Aziraphale.Written for Book Omens Week 2020.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 50
Kudos: 129





	dim the lights, sing the songs

**Author's Note:**

> Basically what I tried to do was write the ur-Book Omens fic. Like the most Book Omens atmosphere I could possibly muster from vibes alone, you know? So here is that.

Crowley rose early; he always did. That was something that had surprised a lot of people over the years, Aziraphale included. He supposed it didn’t fit well with the image he projected, but that was why it was an image and not just _him_. It meant he could surprise people, and he could carve out space for himself where people weren’t expecting him to be. Sometimes (quite often, actually) that space was a hiding place, but mostly it was just comfortable. It was a place where he could slow down, where he could breath, where he could be himself without anyone asking him to be anything else.

So, Crowley rose with the sun. He’d probably had almost two million sunrises to himself, and he cherished every single one.

He had the heat in his flat set to turn on twenty minutes before he wanted to wake up. It was early September, so it wasn’t strictly necessary, but Crowley had spent too many centuries being cold-blooded without central heating to take it for granted. He stretched, waved it off, and got out of bed to pour himself a cup of coffee.

He’d been brewing coffee at home since the 1920’s. He was fond of espresso, and the model of espresso machine he owned contained a dizzying number of implements for grinding and brewing and steaming his coffee. It didn’t have an automatic timer, because it was too complicated an operation to set and forget. All the same, there was a hot cappuccino waiting for him when he got to the kitchen.

After his first cup of coffee, Crowley opened up a newspaper. The human he tried to be would probably have stopped getting an actual _paper_ a long time ago, but the feeling of soft, thin pages under his fingers was as much a part of his morning ritual as coffee and the sunrise. It was like with his car. Maybe it didn’t fit what he was going for, but sometimes the old ways really were best.

Past all the big, scary political news, the big-ticket events Crowley left the humans to sort out for themselves, there were the usual fights over public works projects and gripes about the latest stupid pop-up to grace the storefronts of Shoreditch, much of which had been his own handiwork. He smiled, basking in the warmth of recognition for his hard work from the people whose opinions mattered most.

He turned the page an advertisement caught his eye. It was a production of _A Doll’s House_ being put on by a small company in Vauxhall and staged with “Brechtian elements.” It could be interesting. More likely, it would be rubbish. His smile widened, and he picked up his phone.

* * *

Aziraphale had never gone in the first place. He seldom did, unless Crowley could tempt him into it. It just seemed a waste of time to him, sleeping away hours he could be spending reading or brushing up on his dance moves or card tricks or whatever his current favored hobby was without the threat of a customer coming in and interrupting him.

Not that he should judge Crowley for it, he chided himself. If it made him happy, then it wasn’t a waste of his time. After all, this was Earth, and the whole point was that your time on it was to do with as you wished.

The phone rang, and he picked it up. “A.Z. Fell and Company,” he said.

“Morning, angel,” came a familiar voice on the other end of the line.

Aziraphale smiled. “Good morning, dearest,” he said. “Did you sleep well?”

“Just fine, thanks for asking. Listen, have you got anything on tonight?”

He glanced at the calendar on his wall. [1] Other than his meeting with a representative from the Greener City Fund, there was nothing to do but run the shop. And even that was optional. “No, free as a bird.”

“How would you feel about dinner and a show?”

“Well, that sounds lovely. What’s the play?”

“Some company in Vauxhall’s doing their own take on Ibsen.”

He frowned. “‘Their own take’?” he repeated dubiously.

“Oh, it’ll be fun.” Aziraphale could _hear_ the coprophagous grin on his face. “At best it’ll surprise us, and at worst we’ll have something to laugh about. Come on, Aziraphale, what do you say?”

Now he was smiling again. Crowley loved an opportunity to mock a bad play, but, more than that, he loved to hear Aziraphale mocking a bad play. If Aziraphale was honest, he enjoyed it, too—almost as much as he loved the delighted way Crowley looked at him when he did it. [2] He let out his most convincing put-upon sigh and said, “Fine. I’ll promise you one act, but if it’s intolerable I reserve the right to lead after that.”

“Knew you’d come around, darling,” Crowley purred, evidently happy to take Aziraphale’s indulgence at face value. “Any thoughts on dinner?”

“Hm. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten around to trying NOPI.”

“Ooh. No, we haven’t, have we?”

“Better—” He glanced at the calendar again. ”—nearly a decade late than never.”

“Hey, if it can’t survive long enough for us to get to it, it’s not worth it, I say. So, I’ll pick you up at half five, then?”

“I’ll be ready if you’re on time,” he teased.

Crowley took in an affronted gasp. “Aziraphale, I am trying to do something spontaneous and romantic! If I’m a few minutes late, you’ll keep your mouth shut about it and you won’t complain when I drive fast to make up the time, either.”

Aziraphale chuckled. “I love you, my dear.”

“I love you, too, angel,” said Crowley, dropping the act. “See you tonight.”

* * *

Crowley hung up the phone and smiled at it as though it was Aziraphale he was holding in his hand. He set it down and stood, his coffee mug obediently disappearing to the cabinet where it would wait, clean and dry, until Crowley woke up the next morning and expected it to be ready for him on the counter and full of coffee and steamed milk.

It was a quarter past seven, now. The sun was streaming in through the windows, the last gasp of summer reflecting off the white walls of his flat and glistening off the glossy leaves of his plants. Crowley squinted at a rubber fig in the corner, the light of the sun highlighting the shriveled appearance of one of its leaves. But that was for later, when he needed to unwind from the stress of causing other people stress. For now, he had to get going if he wanted to ruin everyone’s morning commute.

* * *

The shop was open from nine o’clock to nine twenty-three that morning, leaving Aziraphale plenty of time to get to City Hall for his ten o’clock meeting. [3] Ordinarily he’d use his time on the bus to gently nudge people to give up their seats for pregnant and disabled people, or secret money into people’s pockets to give to the homeless. Today, however, he was trying to pull off something big and needed to go over the notes he’d written in the notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. There was a vacant lot that the children of Temple Mills liked to play in, and developers were desperate to snatch up and turn into candy-colored microflats for young professionals. Aziraphale, on the other hand, thought that it ought to be a park.

Perhaps Crowley reveled in long-term projects, but Aziraphale didn’t have the patience. There were so many moving parts, so many uncontrollable factors like luck and the weather and complex human emotions, so much time you had to dedicate with results too subtle to be calculable. Pushing for a public park was the right thing to do, and he cared, he did. Deep down he really thought children living in industrial areas needed greenspace more than anyone, and he was working on this because he knew it would do society good in the long run. But it was _hard_ , and there were a thousand other things Aziraphale would rather be doing that would provide gratification far quicker.

As he approached the steps of City Hall, he felt a familiar pinprick sensation, dark and empty in a way that might send a chill down one’s spine if one was sensitive to that sort of thing. It brushed up against its aura, gnawing at his divinity like a small black hole trying in vain to suck the light out of a sun. Aziraphale looked around, his senses honing in on the lithe figure in a suit slithering up the stairs ahead of him.

“Crowley!” he called.

The figure turned around, and its face lit up with warm recognition. “Aziraphale! Hi!”

Aziraphale hurried up the steps while Crowley waited. He brushed away a dark lock of hair that had fallen into his face and gave him a quick, chaste kiss on the lips. “I didn’t know you were coming here today,” he said, pulling Crowley closer to him by the shoulder. “We could have planned something after.”

“Maybe. It’d have been tight, I’ve got lunch at a tech startup in the City,” he replied, leaning in to Aziraphale’s touch. “What are you doing here, anyway? You don’t do policy, you get people to help mums get prams up the stairs and play matchmaker at LGBT youth centers.”

He sighed irritably. “Sometimes needs must. I’m trying to get a vacant lot turned into a park.”

“Really?” Aziraphale knew Crowley well enough to see the gears turning behind his eyes, even if he couldn’t see his eyes behind his sunglasses. “It’s not the one in Temple Mills, is it?”

Aziraphale furrowed his brow. “Yes,” he said. “Why?”

Crowley grimaced. “Who do you think’s been trying to get it developed? Not with anything too nice or expensive, mind you, just—”

“—microflats, yes. I suppose I should have realized it was you when they weren’t luxury condos or something of that sort.”

“Right,” said Crowley. “Small evil. Flats that won’t drive up the rent, but that are going to be pretty miserable to live in anyway.”

Aziraphale smiled at him. “That’s very thoughtful of you.” He glanced at the great swirling structure of glass and steel before them, and then back at Crowley. “Well, if we’re working at cross-purposes, perhaps we ought to leave it to the humans to sort out what should be done.”

Crowley glanced up at the building as well, making the same calculation, and then he took Aziraphale’s hand. “Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s go see how the ducks are doing.”

At last, Aziraphale relaxed. He threw a grateful arm around Crowley, and he didn’t tell him that he’d been planning to invoke the Arrangement and convince him to take over the park project anyway.

* * *

The ducks were doing well, though it could hardly be said they were ever doing poorly. Individual ducks came and went, but within the confines of the life Crowley and Aziraphale had built since the late Renaissance, the collective unit of ducks at this particular spot felt eternal.

It did not, however, feel sacred, [4] which left them free to sully the spot with whatever ridiculous thing they chose for a topic of conversation.

“I’m sorry, _eggs_?”

“Well they live in the water, don’t they?”

“Aziraphale. Angel. Love of my life. We’ve been over this. Not everything that lives in water lays eggs.”

They were sat on a bench, feeding the ducks some bread. By now they were aware that bread wasn’t good for the ducks, but old habits died hard. The good news was that neither of them _expected_ it to be a problem so it wasn’t as though it was going to _be_ a problem.

“Well, it’s a fresh water animal, isn’t it?” Aziraphale blustered, dropping a handful of crumbs onto the ground as though he was cursing it.

Crowley lowered his glasses long enough to give Aziraphale a good, hard stare.

He met Crowley’s eyes with unblinking defiance, even as his face grew hot. “The _platypus_ is a fresh water animal.”

A human was passing by, so Crowley was forced to replace his sunglasses at the top of his nose. He settled instead for befuddled laughter, which Aziraphale had to admit was rather effective. “What have platypuses got to do with whether hippos lay eggs?” He paused. “Platypi? Platypodes?”

“No idea,” said Aziraphale. “But what they have to do with hippos, my dear, is that platypodes lay eggs, and they’re mammals, and they live in fresh water. Therefore, why shouldn’t hippos?”

Crowley dropped his hands to his sides, exasperated, but he had to admit that he didn’t have a good argument against that.

* * *

The pre-theater dinner at the restaurant was delicious, and their server had excellent taste in wines when they asked, so no cheap pinots were surprised to find themselves converted into anything finer. The piece of theater they saw, however, was absurd. And not in the Samuel Beckett way.

Nora and Torvald were lesbians, now. This wasn’t an inherently bad choice, as it put the Helmers’ money problems in a new and interesting context, but Nora and Torvald had specifically been costumed to be respectively butch and femme, and it was clear the production was trying to say _something_ about that. It begged the question why Torvald had so much power over Nora’s finances and freedom, and there were all sorts of silly effects and fourth wall breaks and musical interludes, not to mention a rather baffling interpretive dance at the beginning of Act II, but it wasn’t bad enough to leave during intermission.

The second half was where it really fell apart. Nora and a (still male) Dr. Rank pantomimed cunnilingus in silhouette behind a curtain at one point, and then there was the ending. Nora stormed out of the living room, as was traditional, and then Torvald was left sitting on the sofa while she and the audience waited a whole minute for the famous slam of the door. It never came, the lights faded, and—to Crowley’s utter delight—Aziraphale was _incensed_.

“It’s the door slam heard around the world!” he half-shouted as they walked back to the Bentley. “Who in their right mind puts on _A Doll’s House_ and doesn’t slam the door?”

Crowley laughed, long and light and lovely as it hit Aziraphale’s ears. He was positively beaming. “I had fun,” he said, sidling closer to Aziraphale. “I think my favorite bit was when Torvald started playing ‘Wonderwall’ at the fancy dress party.”

“Good Lord, that was dreadful.” He shuddered and put an arm around Crowley’s waist, holding him against him as they walked. “Next time, my dear, let’s see something that’s actually good.”

“Hm.” Crowley stopped as they approached the Bentley and reached his hand up to the nape of Aziraphale’s neck, pulling him down for a quick kiss. “It’s just more fun when you get worked up.”

Aziraphale snorted. “For you, perhaps.”

“Come on, admit it, you like it, too.” He pried himself away from Aziraphale and rounded the car to get into the driver’s seat, leaving Aziraphale silence in which he could admit, privately, that he absolutely did.

When he got into the car, Crowley looked at him. He had his sunglasses off at last, and with his eyes exposed all that swagger he put on disappeared. His pupils were wide and rounded in the dim orange light of the streetlamp nearby, and his hands were fidgeting nervously with the steering wheel. He was wearing the same easy smile he had been all night, but without the sunglasses the desperate, hopeful anticipation building up in his chest couldn’t have been more plain.

“So,” he said, “where to?”

Aziraphale felt a wave of affection wash over him, and he smiled. “Just take me back to yours,” he said. “That will be fine.”

* * *

[1] A collection of _Paddington_ illustrations by Peggy Fortnum.

[2] Unless it was a play Crowley happened to like, of course, but the two of them loved to argue as much as they loved to agree so it didn’t matter much.

[3] With the aid of a few miracles to make sure the busses arrived when they said they would, but Aziraphale felt it was better to waste a few miracles on himself than to be tardy.

[4] Although that would only have encouraged Crowley.


End file.
